Since it's only a scant two weeks until Thanksgiving (aka "The Giant Dead Bird Carcass Festival"), I thought I'd ask for clarification on something that's always mystified me: the cornucopia. The Horn of Plenty. (Oooh, baby, I like your horn of plenty.) I know what it is: "a curved goat's horn overflowing with fruit and ears of grain that is used as a decorative motif emblematic of abundance." I know what it looks like. I just don't know why. Why would you use something that, by definition, is too small to contain everything you wish to put in it? I guess it's supposed to be merely decorative and not functional, just like the definition says, but it just seems stupid. They make you learn about it in school and there's really no need.

However, there's something else that gets done in school near the Thanksgiving holidays that rocks. Hand turkeys. What's cooler than hand turkeys? Not a lot. Check out these high-tech hand turkeys made by little kids.

Speaking of turkey, I weirdly just remembered that there is a character with the surname of Turkey in Bartleby the Scrivener. Have you read Bartleby the Scrivener? You should.

"Bartleby the Scrivener" would be a good name for a dog.

I really need to lay off the caffeine.

The Loyola El stop, where I embark each morning, has a Dunkin Donuts contained within it. I've often wistfully considered purchasing a donut on my way to work, but today was the day the dream became a reality. (Dream small, attainable dreams, that's my motto.) So I arrived at the office, answered some e-mail, and began to enjoy the chocolate frosted. The Dunkin Donuts bag has one bit of copy on it that struck me as odd: "As an extra service to our customers, this bag can be reused as a lunch or snack bag." Extra service? To repurpose the bag? If that's the way things are going, then soft drink cans should say something like: "As an extra service to our customers, this can can be crushed and reused as an incredibly crude crack pipe."

The story is strange and the ad campaign is stranger: read the flap about Brussels sprouts. Personally, I like Brussels sprouts, if they're not hideously overboiled, which they most likely are in Britain. It is not a terribly vegetable-friendly country.

I watched this documentary last night called People Like Us, all about the class system in the United States, and there was a section on upper-class rituals, and it reminded me of an amusing experience back in college. Freshman year I ended up in a dorm suite full of rich sorority girls from Tennessee, complete with glowing complexions and way too much formalwear and amazing, syrupy accents. (Although my college made a big show about their suitemate compatibility matching system, and made you fill out a huge, detailed, personal questionnaire, incongruous mismatches like this one seemed to happen fairly often.) So one of the first nights there I'm hanging out in the suite's common room, and one of the girls is telling a story about her "coming-out" party. [serious Tennesee drawl on] Ohmigod my coming-out party was sooo nice...my dress, it was like, handmade? And I had napkins with my name on them? And I got kind of drunk on the punch? And we all went skinny-dipping afterwards, it was wild! Now my best friend's coming-out party...." [serious Tennessee drawl off]. And she was going on and on like this and I'm faking like I'm studying but really I'm getting excited: Wow! I've somehow landed myself in this dorm full of Southern Gothic lesbians! It's so Faulkner-esque! How anthropologically interesting! But sadly, I listened more and it turned out that she was merely talking about her "debutante ball" type of thing, which is almost as anthropologically interesting but not quite. A few well-meaning Midwestern girls gently clued her in to the alternate meaning of "coming-out party."

Now I must go and polish my tiara. (Not true, but not a euphenism either, although it sounds like one.)